Many would wish to be in the shake-out for the award as the most prescient analyst or economist of the banking bust. But
few claims are able to survive an examination of the evidence. So who were the gold-medal economists who made the clearest and earliest warnings about the intertwined domestic banking and economic crises that Ireland has endured?

Predicting home-made bubbles, the most studied since the 1930s, should not be rocket science for economists. This is, after all, what they are paid to do. All the more wonder then that few economists and the policy organisations failed to sound early warnings.

There was little point in warning about a banking crisis late last summer when only the most gullible of commentators believed the protestations of bank chief executives that the Irish banks were solvent.

Analysts who appear to have discovered the banking crisis only when the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) was announced last month are also automatically disqualified from the title race. The main criterion for the award of the most prescient is that the analysts risked credibility by sounding their then unfashionable views.

There were many commentators sounding alarms about housing busts. But the Sunday Tribune has identified three gold-medal contenders, people who early on identified the line that ran from an exploding housing bubble through to a banking collapse and on to huge numbers of people losing their jobs. So, who really got it right?

Two names will rarely appear in Irish newspapers as the analysts who were among the first to blow the whistle.

In the summer of 2006, at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), David Rae and Paul van den Noord wrote a major analysis, Ireland's Housing Boom: What has Driven it and Have Prices Overshot?

Re-reading the report, it is clear that the OECD writers knew the question mark of the report's title to be redundant. The prestigious forecasting body makes clear that it already believed that the much-touted option here that the housing market was heading for a soft landing was bunkum.

Fearing being mired in domestic political squabbles, OECD reports tend to be written in an even-handed way. But, significantly, the report went on to warn that banks were vulnerable when shaken simultaneously by falls in residential and commercial property prices. It noted that, despite facing greater risks, Irish banks held only average loan-loss provisions to protect them from any fallout of a property collapse.

Van den Noord, who now works at the European Commission, and Rae spoke more directly, telling this reporter in May 2006, that Ireland was "ratcheting up" the risks toward a major collapse. Rae, then head of the Ireland desk at the OECD in Paris, presciently said that if house prices failed to correct, then "two or three years down the line, Ireland could have a substantial problem", adding that: "It would take a lot of time to clean up the mess."

The traditional fate of people who warn early and often about impending disasters is that they end up in the wilderness. But the next gold-medal contender, Alan Ahearne, after consistently warning over the past three years about the links between housing crashes and the fragility of Irish banks, instead was appointed as special economics adviser to Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan.

The former Federal Reserve economist and NUI Galway lecturer joined the Department of Finance two months ago – arguably at the most dangerous time for the Irish economy, when it seemed that bond markets did not want to lend the country money. Ahearne had sounded some of the most direct warnings about the crash.

In the Sunday Independent in January 2007, he wrote it was already past time for small residential landlords to get out of the rental market. Major trouble lay ahead, he warned. "The word on the street is that a lot of investors who bought property in Ireland over recent years are getting nervous. At least that's the word on the streets of Galway, but the same is almost certainly true in other places across the country."

He went on: "The optimists, mostly from banks and real-estate agents, will tell you that Ireland's housing market this year will pull off the long-wished-for soft landing, with house prices stabilising but not falling. Unfortunately, the optimists don't have history on their side." That same year, Ahearne was an invited guest at both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael party symposiums. Remarkably, the AIB board directors invited him to speak directly to them in May 2007, the Sunday Tribune has learned. Sources say he told them that a property slump would have severe consequences for Irish banks. The warnings were evidently ignored.

In July 2007, Ahearne linked fears about a slumping property market with the safety of the solvency of the banks, asking rhetorically: Will the banks go bust in a property slump? "Beyond the folks in pin-stripped suits though, the effects of the housing downturn on banks raise wider concerns.

"Bank lending is a key channel though which a property crash could turn into a broader economic crash. When losses from property lending begin to mount, banks may become weary of lending funds to the other sectors of the economy. If companies are unable to borrow, investment spending dries up and the economy heads south. In the worst cases, banks themselves can go bankrupt."

Our final gold-medal contender for the award of the most prescient has in recent months decided to take a low profile.

UCD professor Morgan Kelly has written little since the turn of the year. But he was among the first – years ago – to put a remarkably accurate figure on the cost to the Irish taxpayers of clearing up the mess from failed property and commercial loans.

In The Irish Times in September 2007, he wrote that "while there has been a lot of interest lately in the possible risk to banks from sub-prime loans, nobody seems terribly concerned by the large and rapidly-growing exposure of Irish banks to property speculators."

He went on: "Irish banks are now owed almost as much by builders and developers as they are by mortgage holders, and are now more exposed to commercial real estate than Japanese banks were when they crashed in 1989." Mortgage lending may have slowed since the middle of 2006, he said, but through 2007 lending to developers and builders continued to soar by €20bn to €100bn.

Last month, the architects of the National Asset Management Agency put a remarkably similar bill on the cost of the property lending excess, at €90bn, more than half the value of Irish GDP.

Writing in 2007, Kelly noted that "effectively, the Irish banking system has taken all its shareholders' equity, with a substantial chunk of its depositors' cash on top, and handed it over to builders and property speculators." A better assessment of the banking and economic collapse would be hard to find.